Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Follow Request, Page 6
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Page 6 (two stacked panels). Panel 1: No people — Lizzie's eyeline across the room. A single glossy black grand piano with its lid propped open and one matching bench with a padded cream top stands against the floor-to-ceiling glass, golden afternoon light lying in long bars across the keys. The music desk is bare. Panel 2: On the cream sofa, Lizzie leans forward with her forearms on her knees, bright and interested, turned toward Georgiana, who has gone pink to the ears. LIZZIE: Play something. I'll be a terrible audience, I promise.
Image description
Two panels: the glossy black grand piano standing open against the music room's glass wall in golden light; then Lizzie leaning forward on the sofa to ask a blushing Georgiana to play.
About this chapter
The engagement is public, the town has its version, and now Lizzie has to face the one audience that actually matters. Darcy takes her out to the estate to meet his younger sister Georgiana — seventeen, painfully shy, and the person whose good opinion he cares about more than anyone's on earth. Lizzie arrives at the foot of the stone steps with a knot in her stomach for a reason she can't say out loud: she is the girl who sat in a coffee shop and swallowed George Wickham's story whole, and Georgiana is the girl he actually tried to destroy. The first hour is a slow-motion catastrophe of good manners — a too-formal greeting in the sunlit hall, three people and three cups of tea and nothing to say, Darcy hovering like a man defusing a bomb. Then Lizzie spots the piano, and the girl who can barely finish a sentence sits down and turns into someone else entirely. Lizzie chases Darcy out of the room, and in the golden quiet of the music room Georgiana finally asks the question she has been holding all afternoon: he told you, didn't he — about last summer. Lizzie could be gentle. Instead she tells the truth: she believed every word that man said too, and repeated it to half her town for weeks. The shame Georgiana has carried alone since she was sixteen turns out to be shared, and halved, and survivable. Darcy comes back to find the two of them shoulder to shoulder on the piano bench, heads together, his sister laughing — and the man who spent a year unable to smile is undone in a doorway. By golden hour Lizzie is standing at the top of the steps instead of the bottom, on the inside of the door, with a standing invitation for next weekend. The hard part was never the door.